The News Journal

Lamotte X, head of the Wilmington Peacekeepers, said too many youths have embraced the “thug” culture. / DANIEL SATO/THE NEWS JOURNAL

“You can have a shooter one week who gets shot the next week,” said state prosecutor Kathleen Jennings. / DANIEL SATO/THE NEWS JOURNAL

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When Phillip Costango was gunned down on a Wilmington street, it was a bloody end to a life of crime stretching over nearly two decades.

Costango, 32, had more than two dozen arrests for crimes such as menacing and terroristic threatening. Police said he once pointed a gun at his girlfriend’s head. On probation for dealing cocaine, police said he was selling a half-ounce when he was killed.

Markevus Pulliam, 19, one of two men charged with murdering Costango in June 2011, has racked up at least 41 criminal charges in six years, with cocaine and weapon convictions. He escaped from a detention center and cut off a monitoring bracelet. Pulliam was on probation when he was charged with murder.

Costango is a typical victim and Pulliam a typical suspect in the shooting wars that have terrorized poor neighborhoods surrounding downtown Wilmington for nearly a generation.

More than 90 percent of the shooting victims since January 2011 have criminal records, city police records show. Both gunmen and their prey have averaged about two dozen arrests and 50 charges. Nearly half qualify as “career or habitual criminals,” police said.

Some prosecutors have quietly coined the term “thugicide” to describe the phenomenon of “bad guys shooting bad guys.” The city police brass use a milder phrase – “repeat offenders.”

Both the cops and the lawyers are saying the same thing – that hardened criminals are shooting each other. Armed with high-powered Glocks, Uzis, Tec 9s and other guns, they are prowling already-tough city blocks and making them bloody battlegrounds.

During the last 20 months, Wilmington has had 158 shooting incidents. Of the 183 people struck by bullets, 42 were killed. That tally does not include one man shot to death by police. Both the shooter and the victim in almost all cases are black men or teenagers.

Shootings and other violence on Wilmington’s streets has become a major issue in this year’s mayoral race, with voters set to go to polls Sept. 11 in the Democratic primary that usually decides who runs City Hall.

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Wilmington is also getting a bad reputation nationally. Last month, Parenting magazine labeled it the most dangerous city in America. And FBI data show it was the third most violent city among 450 similar-sized cities behind Camden, N.J., and Saginaw, Mich., in 2010.

But city police chief Michael J. Szczerba said Delawareans shouldn’t fear going to Wilmington unless they are looking for trouble.

“If you are on probation, have an extensive criminal history, are a drug user, readily carry drugs, readily carry weapons, it’s a very dangerous city for you. Stay out of it,” the chief said. “If you come in for a dinner or a show or to visit relatives, it’s a safe city.”

Sometimes innocents are caught in the crossfire. That’s what happened to Alexander Kamara, a 16-year-old high school band member killed during a shootout during a July soccer tournament in Southbridge’s Eden Park as he waited to play the sport he loved.

This summer alone has seen a steady barrage of shootings, several of them shocking:

The crossfire at Eden Park left three dead.

A young woman was shot to death while holding her newborn.

A 15-year-old boy was killed and a 12-year-old wounded one Sunday afternoon.

A man working on his car was killed by bullets intended for somebody else.

An Aug. 26 shootout left one man killed and three wounded.

Szczerba stressed that investigators can almost predict the profile of the shooting suspect and victim when they descend on a scene, he said.

“After spending just a short time investigating, they very rarely walk away wondering how this could ever have happened,” Szczerba said. “As soon as you line up the participants, both the suspect and the victims, you can see a clear picture that this was just bound to happen.”

How gunfire sparks

Gunmen with lengthy criminal records are pulling the trigger so often in Wilmington largely because of the illicit trade in heroin, cocaine, marijuana and prescription painkillers, according to law enforcement officials, neighborhood leaders and residents interviewed for this story.

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Drug gangs are wounding and killing each other over territory. Dealers are getting robbed and shot for their cash or stash. Buyers, some from surrounding suburbs, are easy targets, as are addicts with drug debts. One shooting often breeds a retaliatory strike and then another and another, as combatants deliver “street justice.”

For example, the Trapsters gang were rappers-turned-drug dealers who engaged in a street war in 2010 with the rival Pope’s Group. The conflict led to five shootings, including two murders.

But the drug trade isn’t the only culprit. Petty rivalries and slights over girls or a gold chain or a nickname, even an argument during a dice game or an insult on Facebook, have been the flash point for someone to pull the trigger in an urban subculture where some have little or no respect for life.

Prosecutor Joseph S. Grubb said one gunman fired because the victim “was making fun of the chain he was wearing. He said he looked like a girl, wearing women’s jewelry.”

Many shootings aren’t meant to kill, but to send a message, as the shooter targets the buttocks or legs of the victim.

Dr. Glen Tinkoff, a Christiana Care trauma surgeon, said in August that three recent victims were shot in the back of the knee and will never walk correctly again. Some shot in the pelvis need a wheelchair. Some shot in the abdomen need a colostomy bag.

Rather than being painful reminders of their lives in crime, those injuries can be “badges of honor” for victims, Tinkoff said.

Marketta Mangrum, 31, who lives in northeast Wilmington but often spends time at her mother’s East Side home, said she suspects fewer shootings involve drug deals than police believe.

The guys involved “are not respecting people and their property,” said Mangrum, who has had several run-ins with the law. “That’s why people are getting killed over like $20. Or killing each other over girls. It’s senseless.”

Drugs do play a major role in shootings, but not always because of “territorial beefs,” she said. “It’s guys getting high” and using guns to settle trivial disputes while in altered mental states.

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Lafrance Wilson, a retired cook who lives in West Center City, agreed, saying some who roam the streets are “high on five or six different drugs.” With a gun in their hands, he said it’s no wonder the area has become what he calls “Little Vietnam.”

‘Thug’ culture

Regardless of why the trigger gets pulled, the persistent gunfire and threat of gun battles by longtime criminals have left sections of the city of 71,000 people under siege.

This year alone has seen 70 shooting incidents, with 87 victims, 20 of them killed. That puts the city on pace to shatter its record of 27 homicides in a year – 22 by guns – set in 2010.

As bodies pile up in the morgue and the wounded flood hospitals, residents and policymakers are desperate for some way, any way, to bring peace.

There are calls for National Guard or state police patrols, more cops walking the beat, tougher gun laws, stricter sentences and higher bail. Some are urging less talk and more action by city preachers, more activities for children, and say it’s time for absentee fathers to start raising their sons.

“They need to declare a state of emergency,” said Dayvon Curtis, whose friend Kevin Waterman was killed in July and whose brother Braheem was shot to death last year.

Lamotte X, a retired autoworker who leads Wilmington’s chapter of Peacekeepers, a group that visits dangerous corners and murder scenes, said the boys and men have often grown up in poverty and fatherless homes without a positive male role model.

They have embraced the “thug” culture celebrated in rap videos and perpetuated by street dealers, enforcers and gang members they seek to emulate. “They look at that and translate that into life,” he said. “The guy in the movies with the big car, the money, the pretty car and the jewelry is usually a thug-looking guy.”

That attitude in people who don’t respect themselves and others is a volatile combination, Lamotte X said.

“They don’t see themselves as nothing but they are looking for respect,” he said. “So if someone disrespects them, it can spark something so quick. It seems silly to us but in their world it makes sense to them.”

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Guns available

Kathleen M. Jennings, a state prosecutor in Attorney General Beau Biden’s office, said the true spark for what she calls Wilmington’s “multiple wars” is the proliferation of weapons in the hands of people who won’t hesitate to fire.

“You can have a shooter one week who gets shot the next week,” Jennings said. “That doesn’t make the destruction it brings to a neighborhood any less serious.”

City police inspector Nancy Dietz, who ran the major crimes unit until August, echoed Jennings. Through Aug. 20, city police had seized 189 guns – on pace to shatter last year’s record of 219.

“The bottom line is there are a lot of people with guns,” Dietz said. “When you and I talk and you say something disrespectful it’s just as easy to pull out a handgun and shoot as it was to throw a punch or get into a fight 10 years ago. And having easy access to weapons certainly factors into it when you are talking about drugs and retaliation.”

The violence has made life in the neighborhoods such as the East Side, Hilltop, West Center City, Southbridge, and the blocks off the North Market Street strip so intolerable that Jennings fears for her hometown’s image and future if the gunfire doesn’t abate.

“It’s not good,” she lamented. “It’s not good.”

‘Revolving door’

Life on the roughest blocks can’t improve, police and prosecutors say, as long as violent men manage to remain free on probation, or out on bail awaiting trial – even after spending years of their short lives getting arrested and prosecuted and incarcerated by Delaware’s justice system.

Jennings pointed out that someone who must put up $10,000 secured bond often only has to pay $500 – 5 percent of the total – to a bail bondsman to secure their freedom until trial.

Court checks of several victims found that many had been previously been sentenced to lengthy sentences, only to have the judge immediately suspend the prison term for mid-level probation.

William H. Pennewell, who was shot to death in June, had been sentenced in 2010 to five years in prison for violating probation in a drug case, but his judge suspended the term for boot camp and then home confinement.

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Despite the fact that shooters and victims alike almost always have long criminal histories, Szczerba said a state study showed none of the gunmen charged in 2010 were even being monitored by electronic bracelets, though many were chronic probation violators.

“Not even one of them was even on house arrest, the highest level of probation,” he said.

Szczerba said tougher action against violent, repeat offenders is needed.

“You can’t fully close the revolving door,” Szczerba said. “But I know we can put our foot in that revolving door with higher bail after an arrest on a substantial gun charge. It would stop the speed of that door spinning.

“That’s what we need. I understand that some say that is sending suspects to prison before conviction but how about protecting our community?”

‘I’m scared’

Near those dangerous corners, most residents simply want to be able to relax on their front steps at night, walk to the store or take a stroll, and not be afraid to have friends visit.

Robert Alexander, 78, spends days out front of his West Center City apartment, where he once saw a man shot to death and frequently hears the pop-pop-pop of pistols.

“When it gets dark, I go in because I’m scared,” Alexander said. “People are shooting at people and going robbing. I used to sit out here all night and never worry. But not anymore.”

Marie Johnson, who has lived in the 2300 block of North Market St., within earshot of several recent shootings, said city police need assistance to keep the peace, not just from occasional state police units but from the federal government in the form of the National Guard.

“They need to walk the neighborhood,” Johnson said of military patrols. “Wilmington needs help.”

While it’s unlikely troops will soon be on patrol in Wilmington short of full-scale riots like the ones that followed the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Johnson’s sentiments illustrate residents’ despair.

“It’s just a shame that these young men are taking each others’ lives like that,” Johnson said. “It’s senseless. Sad, really sad.”